Zeyn Joukhadar > Quotes

“I am a woman and a warrior. If you think I can't be both, you've been lied to.”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“Don't forget,' he says, and Abu Sayeed looks up while he translates, holding the words back a little, 'stories ease the pain of living, not dying. People always think dying is going to hurt. But it does not. It's living that hurts us.”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“The most important places on a map are the places we haven't been yet”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“Every place you go becomes a part of you. But none more so than home.”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“Stories are powerful, but gather too many of the words of others in your heart and they will drown out your own. Remember that”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“God smiles through the cracks in broken things.”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“But safety is not about never having bad things happen to you. It's about knowing that the bad things can't separate us from each other.”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“I think to myself, It is terrifying to be visible, and then I think, I have been waiting all my life to be seen.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“Like most people, the name history gave them isn't what they call themselves.”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“I am the dust of stars inhaled.”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“People think that stories can be walled off, kept outside and separate. They can’t. Stories are inside you”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“You are the stories you tell yourself.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“Stones don't have to be whole to be lovely," he says. "Even cracked ones can be polished and set. Small diamonds, if they are clear and well cut, can be more valuable than big ones with impurities. Listen," he says. Sometimes the brightest stars shine brightest, no?”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“Even now, I sometimes run over in my mind all the men who catcall me the moment I step out my door, the men who corner me on subway platforms, the man who reached under my dress at a parade once and slipped his finger beneath my underwear. I think of my father complaining to my mother that the dishes weren't washed, or of the time they fought over something stupid and he called her a camel to shut her up. I grew up with dozens of boys who would one day become the same kind of man. Sometimes the world is one long chain of men from whose anger there is no protection, an obstacle course I run to stay safe.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“I know God heard them both the same at the end, that he loved them both equally even though their prayers were different.”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“New York?" Itto looks down at me. "You may be American, but you are still Syrian."
I rub the camel's coarse hair with my palms. "How?"
"A person ca be two things at the same time," Itto says. "The land where your parents were born will always be in you. Words survive. Borders are nothing to words and blood.”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“Maybe it's true that we become what we love most, that we exalt the nameless by losing ourselves in it.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“To the night, I am a body without a past or a future, a pillar that bends light. The night doesn't know my name.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“the story often matters less than the telling”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“My whole life, Mama and Baba celebrated two religions' worth of holidays—Christmas, Eid al-Fitr, Easter. It used to make me wonder whether the most important things we see in God are really in each other.”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“Wealth is no substitute for belonging”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“If I am in a state of becoming, it has no endpoint. I imagine replacing the memories of everyone I've ever spoken to with the impression that they have only ever seen me as a being clothed in light. In the early part of the twentieth century, homophobes and eugenicists joined forces to study what they called inversion, an early term for homosexuality, gender nonconformity, and transness. They believed they could read and police queerness on the body.

Maybe this is why I don't want to make myself legible. I want to erase the meanings that have been ascribed to my breath, to my sweat, to my hair and fat and skin. I trace the green veins in my neck that branch down into my breasts as feathers. I am painting myself as the bird that, to the world outside this room, does not exist. I draw myself clothed in wings and tell myself that even the angels are sexless.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“Tell me something beautiful," you said.
I opened my mouth and out came the only thing that I had ever known to be as beautiful as it was true: that I had once met a woman who knew how to fly.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“Every place you go becomes a part of you.”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“My name is a song I sing myself to remind me of my mothers voice. My name does not bend to your tongue, does not stop at your borders. My name is not a flight risk. I sing my name to remind me of a time where our language was in our blood. A time when our mothers were in our hair, a time when vowels came from the same deep place as laughter, and the pit of thirst was not so wide. Oh beloved, I walk the gauntlet of life barefoot and bound, clawing at the hills for the voice I left at the house where my mother and her own were born. I gather words like stones to feed my children, they thirst for words that sound like the shape of their eyes. Where oh beloved, where will I find such words?”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“We’re made from clay, after all, aren’t we, and underground springs and threads of copper in our veins. When they ask me where I’m from, they aren’t asking for the city of my birth certificate, but whose earth is in my blood.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“He said, ‘People don’t get lost on the outside. They get lost on the inside. Why are there no maps of that?’ ”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“There is a goodness in the world that got me through, that taught me it's important to know who you are.”
― Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar, The Map of Salt and Stars

“The brain, like any organ in the body, knows wordless truths, knows health from sickness, knows how to recognize self from other. Maybe it's true that the self is every artist's first obsession, that every other subject--a plate of oranges, a mountain, a lover's face-- is just a recognition of the self in another form.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“Maybe she was right to burn my things, little wing. I love you once, and I love you still, but not all migrations end with a return home. Even memory begins to cut if you hold on to it too tight. I don't know anymore if I believe in angels and signs. Perhaps we are the miraculous creatures my mother was looking for.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night